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The Former Yugoslavia

The Former Yugoslavia

During the Kosovo crisis of last year, it was commonplace if not routine to hear two mantras being intoned by those who had decided that "never" would be about the right time to resist ethnic cleansing with a show of force. We were incessantly told (were we not?) that NATO's action would drive the Serbs into the arms of Slobodan Milosevic. And we were incessantly told (were we not?) that the same NATO action would intensify, not alleviate, the plight of the Kosovar refugees. Now there has been an election that was boycotted by almost all Kosovars and by the government of Montenegro. And even with the subtraction of these two important blocs of opposition voters, it is obvious that Milosevic has been humiliated, exposed, unmasked, disgraced.

October 5, 2000

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During the Kosovo crisis of last year, it was commonplace if not routine to hear two mantras being intoned by those who had decided that "never" would be about the right time to resist ethnic cleansing with a show of force. We were incessantly told (were we not?) that NATO’s action would drive the Serbs into the arms of Slobodan Milosevic. And we were incessantly told (were we not?) that the same NATO action would intensify, not alleviate, the plight of the Kosovar refugees.

Now there has been an election that was boycotted by almost all Kosovars and by the government of Montenegro. And even with the subtraction of these two important blocs of opposition voters, it is obvious that Milosevic has been humiliated, exposed, unmasked, disgraced. The Kosovar population could boycott even these proceedings with confidence–unlike their cruel experience of previous decades–because they are all now safely home and because the death squads of Greater Serbia cannot trouble them anymore.

What a spectacle the former allies and apologists of a national socialist Serbia now present. The choicest of all must be Lord Owen, writing in the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps at last, he slimily says, "we" now have a credible Serbian negotiating partner. For the whole period of the Bosnian slaughter, Owen maintained that "we" already did have a credible Serbian negotiating partner–in the figure of Slobodan Milosevic himself! And now, still seeking to help his former friend out of difficulty, the noble Lord Owen proposes a solution to the disposal problem. We don’t want the unpleasantness of a trial, so why not, he suggests, make Milosevic the Yugoslav ambassador to Beijing? Meanwhile, Milosevic said on October 2: "My wish is that people do not see the validity of my warnings too late, that they do not do so once it is too late to right the mistakes citizens made by themselves in their naïveté, shallowness or ignorance." This is the perfected version of Brecht’s old joke about the party dissolving the people and electing a new one.

Yes, of course it is true that Vojislav Kostunica is a nationalist, perhaps even a chauvinist. The same could be said of President Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro. But they are not national socialists. (And they disagree: Djukanovic says Montenegro will cooperate with the war crimes tribunal, and Kostunica says he personally will not.) A heroic Serbian journalist, Miroslav Filipovic, was sentenced to seven years in prison in July for telling some part of the truth about the campaign of murder and rape carried out by "Yugoslav" regulars in Kosovo. Kostunica says he doesn’t believe the reports but doesn’t believe, either, that Filipovic should be in prison. Well–there’s your lesser evil.

A columnist for this magazine wrote a few weeks ago that one should beware an "October surprise," whereby the US military-industrial complex would use the Montenegro crisis as a budget-boosting provocation. This is not being wrong by accident. It is being wrong on purpose. All year, the US government has been urging the Montenegrins to contain themselves and their aspirations. For two years, ever since Djukanovic began to talk of independence, Clinton has spoken dogmatically of the "territorial integrity" of a fictional Yugoslav state. Meanwhile, the Republican leadership has repeatedly stressed its opposition to any overseas intervention that is not strictly oleaginous in character and motivation. I am writing this as Milosevic is holding on to power. Nothing in the posture of political Washington or the Pentagon made him afraid to call, or afraid to try to steal, a fall election he could easily have postponed.

Along with the Mexicans, the Serbian people have put us to shame this year by rejecting the phony choices offered them and by repudiating the politics of manipulation. In both countries, numerous parties and spokespeople were on the ballot and, when it mattered, voted across loyalty lines to secure the general point that an election ought not to be staged. What a contrast to the home of the brave, where public intellectuals run no risk in arguing that the regimentation of parties and the buying or fixing of primaries, conventions, debates and candidates is a secondary issue when compared with their own pet cause.

For an enlightening and sometimes inspiring digest of the Montenegrin opposition journal Monitor, curtain-raising this month’s events, visit www.bosnia.org.uk or write to the Bosnian Institute at 14/16 St. Mark’s Road, London W11 1RQ. This is some of the best-written dissident journalism ever published.

* * *

Debating with Alexander Cockburn on the collusion of Ignazio Silone with Mussolini’s secret police ("Minority Report," June 12), I made the assumption, for the sake of argument, that the published reports of Silone’s collaboration were true. They just didn’t bear the construction that Cockburn put upon them. It now appears that we may both have been party, with differing degrees of relish and reluctance, to a widely and prematurely disseminated falsehood. The original book by Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L’Informatore: Silone, I Comunisti e la Polizia, has been witheringly attacked by the historian Mimmo Franzinelli, who is considered an expert on OVRA, the Fascist police. He accuses Biocca and Canali of misunderstanding the documentation, of simplifying and even mistranscribing the evidence, and of wrongly excluding the possibility that Silone did whatever he did under Communist Party instructions. Subsequent articles and essays in La Stampa and in Corriere della Sera, and interviews with Norberto Bobbio, among others, have begun to make a strong case that the whole charge against Silone is founded either on bad faith or on good faith mixed with mediocre scholarship.

I cannot myself be confident, and I lack the necessary linguistic and historical expertise, but I now feel fairly sure that the first draft in this argument was allowed too much authority. In the circumstances, I feel that I should alert Nation readers to a possibly grave injustice and direct those who are literate in Italian to the June 2000 issue of L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, in which Franzinelli’s rebuttal appears.

Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, Hitchens flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
His books include Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (Cassell, 1976); Hostage to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989); Imperial Spoils: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles (Hill and Wang, 1989); Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990); and The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995); as well as two collections including many Nation essays: Prepared for the Worst (Hill and Wang, 1989) and For the Sake of Argument: Essays & Minority Reports (Verso, 1993). His most recent book is No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 2000).
Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.